Mary de Rachewiltz (born Maria Rudge; July 9, 1925) is an Italian-American [1] poet and translator. She is the daughter of the American poet Ezra Pound, whose The Cantos she translated into Italian. Her childhood memoir Discretions was published in 1971.
De Rachewiltz was born Maria Rudge in Brixen, Italy, on July 9, 1925, the daughter of Olga Rudge, a classical violinist, and Ezra Pound, who was married to Dorothy Shakespear. Her mother placed the girl in the care of a peasant couple after her birth; she was raised on their farm in Gais in the Italian Tyrol. [1] She grew up on a farm speaking the local dialect of German, but when she was older, she began to join her mother, and sometimes Pound, at Olga's house in Venice. There Maria was exposed to a world of culture, literature and politics. In the Tyrolean village, she had access to only two books, but when with her parents, she made full use of a large library, was expected to speak Italian and wear white gloves. As a teenager, she moved away from the mountains and at that point, Pound took her education in hand. During World War II while Pound was making fascist radio broadcasts for Rome radio, he simultaneously took time to teach his daughter literature, telling her "I can only teach you the profession I know." [2]
During World War II Olga lost possession of her home in Venice, and Maria moved for a period with her mother to Rapallo. She was later sent back to Gais when Pound brought his legal wife, Dorothy Shakespear, to live with Olga for a period during the war. [3] During this time, Rudge worked in a German hospital in Italy. She was 19 when her father finally told her about his other family: his wife Shakespear and son Omar, Maria's half-brother. [4] When she returned to Rapallo, she found her father had been arrested by U.S. authorities on treason charges because of his wartime broadcasts; he was being held at the "Disciplinary Training Centre" in Pisa. Pound was taken from Pisa to the U.S., where he was found mentally incompetent for trial. He was committed for the next 12 years at St. Elizabeths Hospital, where he continued to intermittently write, and receive his wife, friends and literary visitors. On his release Pound returned to Italy. He lived for a period with Mary and her family estate castle Brunnenburg. [2]
In 1946, Mary married Egyptologist Boris de Rachewiltz. A son was born the next year, followed by a daughter two years later. [1] They bought and renovated their residence, Brunnenburg castle in the Italian Tyrol. She published an autobiography, Discretions , in 1971. [2] The following year, her father died in Venice. [5]
In the 1980s de Rachewiltz published the first dual-language edition of her father's epic poem The Cantos , which he began work on in the years before 1915 and continued throughout his life until his death. She won the Città di Monselice award in 1986 for the translation of this poem into Italian. [6] [7] She is curator of the Ezra Pound Archive, Centre for the Study of Ezra Pound and His Contemporaries, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. De Rachewiltz studied at Radcliffe College between 1973 and 1975. She has presented lectures about her father's work and modernist poetry throughout the U.S. and Canada. [1] She collected and co-edited with biographer David Moody, her father's letters written to his parents, published in 2011 as Ezra Pound to His Parents. [8]
De Rachewiltz continues to live at the Brunnenburg. She teaches a class on her father's literature for the Brunnenburg exchange program, in which several American universities participate. [9]
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a collaborator in Fascist Italy and the Salò Republic during World War II. His works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and his 800-page epic poem The Cantos.
Desmond Macready Chute (1895–1962) was an English poet and artist, who became a Catholic priest in 1927.
The Cantos by Ezra Pound is a long poem in 109 sections plus a number of drafts and fragments added as a supplement at the request of the poem's American publisher, James Laughlin. Most of it was written between 1915 and 1962, although much of the material in the first three cantos was abandoned or redistributed in 1923, when Pound prepared the first instalment of the poem, A Draft of XVI Cantos. It is a book-length work, widely considered to present formidable difficulties to the reader. Strong claims have been made for it as the most significant work of modernist poetry of the twentieth century. As in Pound's prose writing, the themes of economics, governance and culture are integral to its content.
Dorothy Shakespear was an English artist. She was the daughter of novelist Olivia Shakespear and the wife of American poet Ezra Pound. One of a small number of women vorticist painters, her art work was published in BLAST, the short-lived but influential literary magazine.
Olga Rudge was an American-born concert violinist, now mainly remembered as the long-time mistress of the poet Ezra Pound, by whom she had a daughter, Mary.
Brunnenburg is a 13th-century castle in the province of South Tyrol, in northern Italy.
Boris de Rachewiltz (1926–1997) was an Italian Egyptologist and writer on Africa and the ancient world.
Pietro Lombardo (1435–1515) was an Italian Renaissance sculptor and architect; born in Carona (Ticino), he was the father of Tullio Lombardo and Antonio Lombardo.
Omar Shakespear Pound was an Anglo-American writer, teacher, and translator. The son of Ezra Pound and his wife Dorothy Shakespear, Pound was the author of Arabic & Persian Poems (1970) and co-author of Wyndham Lewis: A Descriptive Bibliography (1978). He also wrote poems of his own and published material about his parents.
Massimo Bacigalupo is an experimental filmmaker, scholar, and translator of poetry, essayist and literary critic. He was a founding member of the Cooperative of Independent Filmmakers in Rome. As a filmmaker of the Italian Independent Cinema, he was influenced by the New American Cinema.
Mary Jane Phillips-Matz was an American biographer and writer on opera. She is mainly known for her biography of Giuseppe Verdi, a result of 30 years' research and published in 1992 by Oxford University Press. Born in Lebanon, Ohio and educated at Smith College and Columbia University, she lived for many years in Italy, and even after her return to the United States in the early 1970s spent her summers in Verdi's hometown of Busseto where she continued her exhaustive research into his life. She died in New York City at the age of 86, survived by three of her five children.
Anna Maria Ortese was an Italian author of novels, short stories, poetry, and travel writing. Born in Rome, she grew up between southern Italy and Tripoli, with her formal education ending at age thirteen. Her first book, Angelici dolori, was issued in 1937. In 1953 her third collection, Il mare non bagna Napoli, won the coveted Viareggio Prize; thereafter, Ortese's stories, novels, and journalism received many of the most distinguished Italian literary awards, including the Strega and the Fiuggi. Although she lived for many years in Naples following the Second World War, she also resided in Milan, in Rome, and for most of the last twenty years of her life in Rapallo. L'iguana, Ortese’s best-known work in English translation, was published in 1987 as The Iguana by the American literary press McPherson & Company. As of 2023, what she considered as her most important work, the novel Il porto di Toledo (1975), had not been translated into English yet.
Gennaro Favai (1879–1958) was an Italian artist.
William Brooke Smith was an American painter and friend of Ezra Pound. His death from tuberculosis greatly affected Pound, who dedicated his first poetry collection, A Lume Spento, to Smith.
Petr Mikeš was a Czech poet, translator, and editor. In the 1970s and 1980s he took part in the samizdat edition Texty přátel. From 1993–1997 he was the influential editor-in-chief of the Moravian publishing house Votobia, and from 2000–2004 at the Periplum publishing house. He was a significant translator of Ezra Pound into Czech. He translated members of Pound's "circle", including Basil Bunting, T.E. Hulme, and James Joyce, and even wrote a screenplay for a biopic on the life of Ezra Pound, Solitary Volcano (unproduced).
The expatriate American poet Ezra Pound recorded or composed hundreds of broadcasts in support of fascism for Italian radio during World War II and the Holocaust in Italy. Based in Italy since 1924, Pound collaborated with the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini and expressed support for Adolf Hitler. Written at first for EIAR, and later for a new radio station in the Salò Republic, a Nazi puppet state in northern Italy, the broadcasts contained deeply antisemitic and racist material. They were transmitted to England, central Europe, and the United States, mostly in English, but also in Italian, German, and French.
If This Be Treason ... is a 33-page booklet published privately in Italy in early 1948 by Olga Rudge, mistress of the American poet Ezra Pound. Pound, who lived in Italy with his wife from 1924 to 1945, was indicted in absentia for treason in 1943 by the United States District Court for the District of Columbia after he made hundreds of radio broadcasts, pro-Axis and deeply antisemitic, on behalf of Fascist Italy during World War II and the Holocaust in Italy. The title phrase had previously been used in a speech by Patrick Henry in 1765.
Stefano Bianchi is an Italian astrophysicist who is currently an Associate Professor at the Mathematics and Physics Department of Università degli Studi Roma Tre in Rome, Italy. He is an INAF Associate and an IAU Member.
The Premio Monselice per la traduzione letteraria e scientifica was an Italian award established "to enhance the activity of translation as a particularly important form of cultural communication between peoples".
Discretions, also published as Ezra Pound, Father and Teacher: Discretions, is a 1971 memoir of Mary de Rachewiltz, an Italian-American translator and poet. It is about Rachewiltz's childhood with a foster family in the Italian Tyrol and about her father, the American poet Ezra Pound.
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